Unfolding controversies over landed properties and vehicles acquired by public servants under the monetisation policy suggest an urgent review of the scheme is overdue. Apart from recoveries made by the anti-graft agencies from civil servants, two high profile persons are also currently engaged in legal tussles over property and severance payments. President Muhammadu Buhari should stop the criminal abuse the policy has suffered since its introduction in 2003.
Introduced with the aim of saving costs, the abuse of the Monetisation of Fringe Benefits system is however adding to the prohibitive cost of governance. The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission recently said it had recovered two high-rise buildings and N18 million fraudulently acquired by civil servants who manipulated the policy. This was preceded by allegations that the now suspended director-general of the Securities and Exchange Commission allegedly caused about N104 million to be paid to him as severance after just two years and seven months as a SEC commissioner even though he was still in service as the DG.
A bigger fish in the person of former two-term Senate President, David Mark, was soon embroiled with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission over the purchase of a mansion that had served as his official residence. The monetisation policy has clearly derailed and the Nigerian taxpayer is paying heavily for it.
A report by the Special Investigation Panel on the Recovery of Public Property alleged that not only were government houses sold cheaply, some, like those sold to a former Senate President, his deputy, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and his deputy, were expressly excluded from the monetisation policy. The perversion of the policy demonstrates afresh how corruption drives governance in Nigeria, even policies that work very well elsewhere. It explains why less than two per cent of the country’s 186 million people – elected and appointed officials, civil servants and overheads – guzzle 70 per cent of the national budget.
Designed under the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidency to reduce the costs of governance, free government from providing accommodation and basic amenities for public officials, it was agreed to monetise fringe benefits of public officials after the pattern adopted in the “Certain Political, Public and Judicial Office Holders Act 2002.” This law had spelt out and monetised perks for political office holders, judicial officers and legislators. Instead of the financially and bureaucratically burdensome practice of providing accommodation, recreation, vehicles, drivers, domestic servants and medical care for public officers, they would be paid a fixed sum and, where necessary, loans, such as for the purchase of vehicles, would be granted. Non-essential government-owned residential buildings would be sold to the public on highest bidder basis.
According to subsequent reports by the ICPC, EFCC and the Presidential panel, rampant abuse began immediately with the “first option” provision wherein current occupiers were given the right of first refusal. Some 24,345 houses were eventually sold out of the 32,305 identified by the committee. The ICPC discovered that many were sold at below market price; officials concealed official property and collected rent on them; some had not paid for houses since 2005, while “civil servants…have turned the policy into shady business with the aim of defrauding the Federal Government.”
No country can make progress, reverse poverty or provide functional amenities where officials fraudulently appropriate so much to themselves. Of the promised benefits: efficiency in resource allocation, cutting waste, misuse of public facilities and enabling civil servants to own houses, only the last has been generously fulfilled. One civil servant was accused by the EFCC of owning 64 properties in Abuja.
The most brazen abuse has come from politicians and heads of departments and agencies. Officials deliberately use public funds to build, furnish or renovate houses that they eventually buy on the cheap. Successors come in, cause the agencies to build new ones and also buy them cheaply at the end of their tenure. Resolutions are taken by statutory boards voting massive benefits and severance pay for members and duly approved by supervising ministries and protected by enabling laws. The first commissioners of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission allegedly left after three years with a combined N1.5 billion in legitimate severance, inclusive of two years of their uncompleted five-year term; their successors got a combined N2.04 billion as severance.
The practice of selling houses to occupants should stop. There should be strict adherence to the policy, so that only officials like the President, vice-president, principal officers of the National Assembly and security chiefs and a few top functionaries should have official houses.
Buhari should halt the appropriation of public funds to acquire expensive vehicles for serving and departing officials. The practice of gifting departing public officials with multiple vehicles is theft but is widespread in the National Assembly and the 542 Ministries, Departments and Agencies; about-to-retire executives purchase cars that they will drive away as entitlements. When his successor accused him of making away with 24 vehicles, a former Inspector-General of Police, Solomon Arase, responded that he was entitled by convention to go with four cars and that his two immediate predecessors went away with 13 and nine vehicles respectively. But a former British Prime Minister, David Cameron, got only £20,000 as severance pay and is entitled to £115,000 per year to run his private office as Public Duties Cost Allowance: he is not entitled to choice government plots of land or vehicles.
Government should recover by all lawful means, all public property and money improperly acquired under the policy, including those under-priced and those granted waivers by arbitrary presidential fiat. Searchlight should be beamed afresh on the National Assembly that has defeated the monetisation policy by buying vehicles for lawmakers using the ruse of committee work despite collecting car loans. The policy had made provision for pool vehicles for group assignments, but this has been defeated as public servants commit humongous amounts of public funds to buying vehicles.
Buhari would disappoint once more if he fails to move fast and decisively to end this perfidy.
